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Mubarak on Trial

An old man coming to answer the charges against him, along with the son once expected to succeed him: we saw a version of that the week before last, when Rupert Murdoch walked into Parliament. But we have seen nothing like the trial of Hosni Mubarak, who flew in on a helicopter, was brought into court on a hospital bed, and then put into a cage with two of his sons, Alaa and Gamal. For a while, both sons stood to shield him; Alaa sat down first, according to Al Jazeera’s Evan Hill, who was live-blogging the trial, leaving Gamal, who had once been closest to power, to strike a Wendi Murdoch-like pose. There was no pie, though, and, despite an abundance of disruptions and theatrics, little that could be made so light of. At one point, a lawyer for the family of one of the people killed when Mubarak’s forces tried, brutally, to break up the protests in Tahrir Square began waving an ink pad and shouting that Mubarak had never been fingerprinted like a common criminal. Another one wanted a DNA test, to make sure that this was Mubarak, and not a caged impostor. He has been allowed to stay in a hospital, rather than a jail. The extent to which the hospital bed was as much a prop as a necessity was one of the many contentious issues in court in Cairo this morning.

There were multiple angry crowds, both inside the courtroom, which had been set up in the police academy, and out. A giant television screen had been set up for viewing; there was no effective effort to divide those who hated Mubarak and those who missed him, and the result was injuries starting early. There was crying and shouting and rock-throwing, the Times reported. Three thousand police and soldiers had been deployed. Mubarak, his children, and his cohorts—Habib al-Adly, the former interior minister, was in the cage, too—arrived with dozens of lawyers, so many that it took a while to sort out who they were. There were also lawyers for the dead protesters’ families—their deaths are at the heart of the legal charges—and lawyers who just seemed to have something to say. There were also the prosecutors, and the judge, who, according to the BBC, began by asking for good behavior:

The civilised Egyptian people require calm … to make sure that the mission of the court is carried out fully so we can please God almighty and our consciences.

Everyone shouted instead. (“What does what you’re saying have to do with the trial?” the judge asked one lawyer, according to the Telegraph.) Mubarak, for his part, said, “Yes, I am here,” and “I deny all these accusations completely.” (So did his sons.)

There was real surprise that he was, indeed, there; other trials of dictators, over the years, have had endless opening gambits dominated by claims of illness—that the strong man is just too weak—which sometimes derail the proceedings entirely. (See Honecker, Pinochet.) And that is also a theme here. But Egypt has been a place for the unexpected this year, and the trial has begun. The proceedings adjourned for the day in the early afternoon; they continue tomorrow, though Mubarak himself may not be back for a week or more. It wasn’t late in the day when the lawyers and protesters were asked to go; still, it is Ramadan now, and most people wouldn’t have eaten since before dawn.